23 January 2003

Contents

Show

A Burns (pre-) Supper Special from Peel Acres, organised by Hermeet, with Burns songs and poems arranged by various bands, broadcast two nights early, since there was no programme on the actual Burns Night. John apologises because the songs were burned to CDs quickly and may therefore not start immediately.

The Peel Sessions lists all of these, with the exception of the Aphrodisiacs, as bona fide Peel sessions, although not announced as such by Peel, and they have thus been included in the listing below.

(JP: 'This next track requires a bit of explanation, because for about 25 years, possibly longer, nobody can remember exactly how long it was, including me, but I did programmes each week for BFBS, British Forces Broadcasting. This was by no means an endorsement of militarism because I was in the army meself, and I certainly didn't go in there with the intention of, I had no choice actually, with the intention of trying to kill anybody, and I was grateful that nobody seemed to be interested in killing me at the time either. But as a result of doing these programmes, and obviously I got paid for doing 'em, but it did quite transform my life to be honest, because the programmes, you know, they were broadcast on BFBS and listened to by lots of soldiers and so forth, but they were also listened to by German civilians particularly, obviously in Germany, and as a result of that I was once voted the number one DJ in Germany, of which I was ludicrously proud, and for a man who could only say about five words of German even then and has now expanded to about ten, I thought that was really quite an achievement. It also meant that the Pig and myself and elements of our family used to go to Germany quite a lot and had loads of mates there, and they still come and see us and their children and stuff, so if it hadn't been for BFBS, none of these things would have happened. There were times of course when it was pointed out to me that the programmes weren't particularly popular with all sections of the army, and in fact during the Falklands campaign, they used to record them onto I guess cassettes or something, I'm not quite sure, send them out to the various ships in the South Atlantic, and on some big aircraft carrier or something that was almost permanently out there, these cassettes would arrive and then be broadcast over the ship's PA, as I understand it. Over a period of time, they discovered there was only one person on the ship who actually liked them. So when the cassettes arrive from London, they just called this bloke on the tannoy and gave them to him. I really like the idea of that: person to person radio programmes. I mention all of this because I was sent this very day actually by some lads who were in the army in Bielefeld, and they're in a band called Groovycide.')

(JP: 'After having missed two Pig's Big 78s because of my stupidity in the beginning of the week, it's time: the Pig has risen from her bed of pain...(to her) You've got a bit of a cold, haven't you?')